How to Prepare SEO for Summer

Summer is closing in, and people are slowly getting ready for vacations and holidays.

But in the world of SEO, time never stands still.

As a result, the most successful companies in terms of SEO are the ones who have made a solid strategy for the summer period.

But what should you prioritize, what can be automated and when should you hire professional help?

All these questions, and more, will be answered in this thorough blog post about preparing SEO for summer.

Table of contents:

Inconsistency leads to loss in traffic
Use a content calendar
Reach number 1 as competitors leave for vacation
Google Core Web Vitals are to be rolled out over the summer: Are you ready?
Automatic scheduling of content during summer

Inconsistency leads to loss in traffic

Consistency and inconsistency falls in two categories: Upload and Tone of Voice.

Upload

As you and your colleagues go on vacation, the amount of content you upload to your site might very well be heavily reduced.

As a result, the flow of uploaded content is inconsistent. If your competitors are smart, they have made a plan to overtake your “content-area” while you are away.

To make use of this strategy yourself, please refer to section 3 of this blog post; “Reach number 1 as competitors leave for vacation”.

A helpful mitigation strategy would in this case be the planning of regularly uploaded content. Depending on your CMS, you can easily automate this task as well. Read more about this in section 5 of this blog post.

By consistently uploading content to your site, you are able to keep your target audience’s attention throughout the summer months. This will in turn increase your overall performance and ranking factors with Google.

This phenomenon is in the world of SEO also known as "content velocity". Basically, content velocity is a metric calculating the rate at which you upload fresh content.

Calculating competitors content velocity is also beneficial to scope out how many resources they post into SEO. As a result, you can calculate how many resources you need to invest in content production and other SEO-practices to overtake their rankings.

Tone of Voice

Another important aspect of consistency is your brand’s overall Tone of Voice (ToV henceforth).

By speaking the same “language” over a multitude of pages, you signal to your readers who you are. Insofar this “language” resonates with your target audience, you will gain their trust.

And everyone knows that trust is the bedrock of healthy relations, and thereby sales.

In contrast, imagine if you spoke in different tones to your customers. You would quickly confuse the customers, thus resulting in lower trust. A classic idiom for this trust-building phenomenon is: “You have to talk the talk and walk the walk”.

So, how can you make sure to keep your ToV consistent over the summer?

The very best solution is obviously for you to sit at your desk and write the content yourself.

But if you are going on vacation, this might not be a valid possibility.

Instead, you could collaborate with an external agency to take care of your content production. Here, you must be very cautious.

Hiring an agency might fulfill the content upload-gap over the summer months, but might very well be a swing and a miss in regards to ToV-consistency.

Investigate your potential collaboration partners, and make sure they are fit for the task.

Are you looking to partner up with a serious agency to manage the content tasks over the summer?

Let Bonzer take you through summer with a tailored SEO-strategy.

Use a content calendar

A content calendar is a helpful tool to keep your content coming out at a consistent rate.

Creating a simple and intuitive overview of your planned content will help you keep track of things during the inactive summer months.

Also, a calendar can help you scope the publishing of your content at a steady rate. This way you won’t have periods with high amounts of content, and periods with low amounts.

By keeping the publishing of content at a steady rate you make sure to keep your target audience hooked and interested over the summer months.

Make your own copy of this content calendar.

As an example, we used the content calendar to map out different types of content to be published for our client DailyWatch. This ensured a clean overview of the months to come and a steady content velocity.

Example of the content calendar used for DailyWatch:

Reach number 1 as competitors leave for vacation

If you are facing issues with consistently uploading new content over the summer, chances are your competitors are facing the exact same issue.

In other words, there is a golden opportunity to fill out the content gaps over the next couple of months.

An opportunistic approach to this phenomenon is to create expert, authoritative, and trustworthy content that will dominate the Google search results.

Read more about the importance of “expert, authoritative, and trustworthy” (EAT) content here.

Because even if the local office spaces are left empty over the course of summer, people’s need to google will persist. There will constantly be a demand for information - the question is whether the market is there to supply it.

The demand is steady, whereas the supply goes on vacation.

As a result, summer is an opportune time to supply the users with relevant and useful content.

What can you hope to achieve by filling the content-gap?

Increase traffic to your website
Strengthen knowledge of your brand
React first to new movements in your specific market
Give users relevant content; thus increasing the trust that customers have for your business

If you yourself also plan to leave for vacation over the summer, you might be interested in letting Bonzer take care of your content production, technical SEO, link-building strategies and other SEO-related tasks.

Let Bonzer fill out the SEO-gap for you.

Automatic scheduling of content during summer

After preparing your content calendar, it’s a great idea to write the content and automate the publishing process.

Then you can take leave for vacation, while content automatically gets uploaded to your site.

Depending on your specific CMS, you can with relative ease schedule content to be published on specific dates.

In WordPress, this is done under the “Publish” feature.

First, you set the desired date by pressing on “Publish = Immediately”. Here, you are presented with a calendar. Choose the date.

Then, you simply press “Schedule…” and your content will be published on this specific date. Easy and simple.

This, of course, requires you to have a bunch of content ready to be published.

Do you have content ready? Or do you need help creating valuable content over the course of the summer?

Let Bonzer create compelling and engaging content that both meets your customers needs and performs well on search engines.

Google Core Web Vitals are to be rolled out over the summer: Are you ready?

As forewarned in a blog post by Google in May 2020, Google is now rolling out the much anticipated Core Web Vitals.

This new update will put an increased emphasis on the technical aspects of your site. The end result is a better and richer user experience.

In short, the update contains 3 elements:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

First Input Delay (FID)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

As the new update is rolled out over the multitude of websites that Google crawls, rankings will both plummet and soar.

Now, the crucial question is how the update will influence your site’s rankings.

Will you drop substantially?

Or could the update be your chance to get ahead of the competition?

To find out, you need to perform a technical analysis of your pages.

Learn more about the technical analysis and Core Web Vitals in general right here: “What is Core Web Vitals and How to Optimize”.

If you don’t have the necessary skills or time to analyze your site in regards to Core Web Vitals, you should strongly consider teaming up with an agency that can.

Prepare for Core Web Vitals over the summer with Bonzer.

Now you’re prepared for SEO over the summer – and if not, Bonzer is ready to assist you!

Laying the groundwork for great SEO-performances over the course of the summer months is one thing.

Another thing is actually executing the plan, adjusting to changes, and keeping up with the constant updates coming from Google — and take our word for it, Google updates do not go on vacation!

At Bonzer, we specialise in everything SEO – from content and keywords to link building, strategy, technical optimisation, and much more. We are ready to help you achieve the organic growth you deserve.